The tension created by the two-court system is an integral part of England’s administrative and constitutional history. Exactly how integral has generated a considerable amount of scholarly work, from explanations of the sources of the conflict, to how the disagreement over jurisdiction was addressed throughout the Middle Ages, to what impact the issue had in shaping England’s overall political development.

Perhaps the best way to capture the essence of the relationship between Richard, John and their magnates is to focus on one such relationship and to analyse the changes it underwent over the twenty-seven years the two brothers ruled England. The career of Walter de Lacy provides an excellent opportunity for such an analysis.

I want to push this a bit further here and argue that Dudo was aiming to produce something that we might term sacramentary history, to show the three-fold interaction of the linear time experienced by fallen humanity, the cyclical time in which events are continually re-enacted and foreshadowed in the sacraments, and the unchanging eternity of time as experienced by God.

Nevertheless the introduction of the knight into England still remains a controversial topic of discussion among military historians, since the people who inhabited England prior to 1066 were part of warrior culture as well: the Anglo-Saxons.

Produced almost 250 years after first contact with the Norman colonizer, the exclusive use of Middle English was a subversive choice that challenged the Norman claim to power and criticized the post-Conquest kings of Norman descent while working to re-make and re-claim an ‘English’ identity.

This project seeks to identify the processes at work in Scandinavian and Anglo- Norman colonialism in Ireland, and their interaction with the landscape, by examining the impact of each phase of activity on the settlement pattern in two representative case-study regions. The successes, failures, similarities and differences of Scandinavian and Anglo-Norman settlement and society in Ireland are examined and compared in this project in terms of three sub-phases of the overall process, namely expansion, consolidation and domination, within an overall developmental diachronic framework.

This lecture is part of Medieval Book History Week. Renown Professor Jeremy Catto spoke about literacy and language in England during the later Middle Ages at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto.

Of the lands in Aberdour, we begin in very uncertain time long before the Sisterlands became such and a period from which few documents are available. It is thought that shortly after 1100 some of the lands in what was later to become the burgh of Aberdour came to be held by a Norman-French family, the Viponts.

In monasteries and cathedrals of the medieval West, the « custos librariae » functioned primarily as a custodian or keeper of bound codices, and we see a similar role emerge from extant medieval registers from Breton cathedral chapters.

A damned inheritance, hopelessly over-extended and out-resourced by the kings of France? Or an effective empire thrown away by incompetence and harshness? John Gillingham weighs the blame for John’s loss of the Angevin dominions.

While records of Edith’s life and her marriage to Edward are poor, the historiography of those who narrated her life after her death is rich. In some ways, the historiography of her life was directly related to that of her husband’s.

The Normans remain as the standard bearer of the pre-revisionist interpretation of crusader motives – for gold and glory, but not for God. However, examination of the evidence does not bear this distinction out.

Ella Armitage’s analysisof early Norman castles in 1912 provides a clear espousalof this view, in particular her statement that in England the reasonsfor the erection of mottes seem to have been manorial rather than military; that is, the Norman landholder desired a safe residence for himself amidst a hostile peasantry, rather than a strong military position which could hold out against skilful and well-armed foes.

It is clear to most modern historians who have studied Geoffrey’s Historia that its contents bear little to no resemblance to real events. Even in Geoffrey’s own lifetime many historians condemned the work.

Peter Bramley’s beautifully illustrated field guide and companion to the Norman Conquest gives full details of both the events and the personalities associated with each of these sites, together with the historical background and the reasons for the end of Anglo-Saxon rule.

This paper, in examining the reigns of the Ethelred, Canute, Harold Harefoot and Hardicanute, and Edward the Confessor, will show how they came to power, the legacy each left – if any — and how the events during each reign ultimately led to the Battle of Hastings, with William the Conqueror’s victory changing England forever.

Emma, the mother of Edward the Confessor, had walked over hot iron ploughshares to disprove an allegation of intimacy with Alwyn Bishop of Winchester, while Curthose, the Conqueror’s son, is reputed to have undergone the ordeal to prove his paternity.

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Starting around 500 AD, Medieval Warfare examines European history during the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and the beginning of the Renaissance (the magazine generally leaves off around 1500). With a host of different nations and cultures competing for dominance during this period, topics in the magazine are extremely varied and diverse. While popular topics such as the Crusades and Anglo-French wars are given regular coverage, Medieval Warfare also tackles more complex and obscure topics, such as the myriad wars between the Italian city-states and the frequent conflicts between Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Empire.

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